Archive for the Artists Category


Go Nagai’s DevilMan Lady, Disk 1

December 13th, 2020

Fans of Go Nagai’s work are probably pretty familiar with his Devilman franchise, which has spawned a number of anime and manga series over the decades. More recently fans may have encountered his work in Devilman Crybaby, which streams on Netflix. I personally found that iteration to be one of the best anime I’d ever seen.  Yuasa Masaaki’s directorial touch meshed perfectly with Go Nagai’s conceptual framework for a truly epic series.

Devilman Lady has always been a less-known sideshow of the Devilman franchise, but it has also always been one of my absolute favorite anime, for many reasons – among them, top voice actors, Go Nagai’s vision, the soundtrack and that the story is profoundly and overtly Yuri. Now, almost 20 years after the anime was first released in the US by ADV, here we are thanks to Diskotek who has reissued the complete series in a 2-disk Blu-Ray set. Honestly…I still think it’s fantastic.

The story follow Fudou Jun, a professional model. It’s almost hard to understand what people see in her, as Jun is painfully awkward and nervous but, when she gets in front of the camera, something seems to come over her. One day she is kidnapped and forced into a warehouse with a beast-monster, and learns that she is, in actual fact, a Devil Beast. Unlike many of the transformations happening around town, she retains her humanity when she transforms, making it that much more awful when she has to kill beasts she knows were once- and maybe could still be – human.

The Yuri in this series is so constant that it’s almost diminishing to lay it out. Jun encounters an old classmate who was in love with her, and a new rival model who desires her on this disk, in two fantastically gay episodes. Asuka openly desires Jun when she is a Devil Beast. It is not subtext to say that the entire story is constantly reminding us that Jun is closeted about several things, not just being a Devil Beast.

Diskotek has done a stellar job with this anime. The animation screams 1990s, but the visuals look fresh and crisp and the sound is excellent. Diskotek used ADV’s English track which was good for its time, but very much has that feel of early voice acting when anime was just taking off here.

The soundtrack deserves a mention, too. The theme for this anime is fantastically gothic. I actually bought the soundtrack album for it, and it’s basically the same one theme remixed a couple of times. ^_^ The fight scenes though, have music that sound like the opening theme of a night-time crime-solving couple series from ’90’s American TV. Cracks me up every episode. Giant horrific Devil Beast monsters fighting over Tokyo and the BGM is like Hart & Hart. ^_^

I know horror is not for everyone. Go Nagai is not for everyone. This series is definitely Nagai’s specific brand of sexualized demonic monsters, with both physical and psychological horror elements and dustings of dread and misery and pathos as needed. It will occasionally make you very sad and possibly quite angry. It’s a shockingly good Yuri anime that has an ending that is good and bad, hopeful and miserable all at once.

Ratings:

Art – 9 for 1990s
Story –  9 Depressing, scary and creepy, sometimes emotionally crushing. But fascinating, even compelling.
Characters – 8 No one is what they initially seem, especially not Jun.
Service – 8 Yes, very. The is Go Nagai we are talking about.
Yuri – 8, but wait, there’s more!

Overall – 9

If you don’t want to commit to buying this set, you can watch DevilMan Lady as the dubbed version The Devil Lady free and legally on RetrocrushTV.

In my opinion DevilMan Lady is an absolute classic of Yuri and should not be ignored. I’m thrilled we can experience it once again.

Many, many thanks to Okazu Superhero Eric P for his sponsorship of today’s review!





The Rose of Versailles, Volume 2

December 6th, 2020

Unrest is starting to build among commoners as royal spending, bankrupts the country. while Oscar is struggling to balance unrest at home, in Paris and at Versailles. Rosalie is being pressured by her birth mother to come live with her, and her sister, the grifter Jeanne Valois, is at the center of one of the greatest scandals of the Queen’s life.

This volume is full of so many tears, it almost becomes comic….almost. It never is, because the cost of human suffering is as immeasurable in the 18th century as it is now, only we’re far more likely to have a bigger-picture understanding of it.

Nonetheless, Ikeda-sensei’s work makes understanding suffering almost unavoidable in fact, as she pinpoints individual stories in the middle of the greater situation. We’re more aware of the plight of Parisians in general because we spend time with Rosalie and Bernard.  We’re meant to understand them in a way we and Oscar will never understand the lack of empathy of the noble class.

Volume 2 of The Rose of Versailles is also one of the “Yuriest” volumes of this classic series in one sense and in another, not really. Jeanne implicates the Queen in the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace and, while testifying before the court, insists that she and the Queen were lesbian lovers. In addition, she accuses Oscar of being Marie Antoinette’s lover, as well. Oscar is not amused.

Her sentiment, a sneered “I Lord Oscar, lesbian? I’m breaking out in hives! To hell with you! What a joke!” is hard for us in 2020 to take at face value, when mere pages separate that and her repeated vow that had she been a man, she would have married Rosalie herself.

Volume 2 is about structural change. When the foundations of a building begin to crack, the people on the highest floors can feel the instability, even if they are initially insulated from the immediate damage. Once again, I’m reading this volume thinking it is just a little too on the money, as our society is shaking the foundations once again for all the very same reasons.

I want to shout out here to Jeannie Lee, whose lettering is so exceptional and to both Mari Morimoto and Jocelyne Allen for doing painstaking work on the translation. I’m still blown away by this gorgeous edition of a long-awaited classic manga. It was a privilege to have worked on it with them.

Ratings:

Art – 8 As Oscar matures, so does the art
Story – 8 Dense and melodramatic
Characters – 9 Everyone is flawed and human
Service – 5 Oscar in a uniform and in a dress.
Yuri – 1 No, but…kinda?

Overall – 8

 





Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution

November 20th, 2020

Tenjou Utena was a girl who wanted to become a prince. She actually did rescue a princess…and became the power to revolutionize the world. But at what cost?

20 years have gone by and the members of the student council are still trapped in their own drama. The girl who gained the power to change everything had left them behind to find their own way out. Being mere humans, not princes, they had failed to do take the steps they needed to be free. If this sounds like a fanfic, well, it pretty much is. Like so many fanfic it begins with Touga, Saionji, Juri and Miki still caught up in the same dysfunctional relationships that bound them at Ohtori. 

In Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution, co-creator of Revolutionary Girl Utena Chiho Saito, revisits the Student Council members. Touga and Saionji are finally allowed to cast off the lingering ghost of  the Chairman of Ohtori, and find the camaraderie with each other that had been twisted into a toxic rivalry. Juri discovers in herself a more honest reason to keep fighting and is able to let go of of regret and failure. Miki is finally able to have an honest discussion with Kozue about their relationship.

Viz Media’s reproduction of this 20th anniversary manga is so excellent, I’m almost sorry that they didn’t give it a hardcover edition to match the box set of the original manga. Adrienne Beck’s translation kept the voices we already knew so well. Sara Linsley went out of her way to do an award-worthy lettering job. She’s detailed how she hand-drew the sound effects to match the Japanese volume on Twitter. Designer Alice Lewis did a terrific job and I know that Nancy Thistlethwaite as editor gave it the most loving treatment possible. It looks terrific. Great job folks.

Like so many fanfic, this manga is excellent, right up to the point where it fails to do the last thing it needed to do. Because, as she says in the afterword, Saito-sensei was unwilling to allow Utena to grow up…indeed, she youthens her for this story, Utena and Anthy’s reunion is not of this world, but very much in a world that only the two of them occupy. I had read the chapters as they came out in Flowers hoping desperately that we’d get to see Utena and Anthy together in the “real” world. It’s wholly understandable why this was the path chosen…it’s just not the one I wanted. ^_^ OTOH, Juri is still with Shiori and Utena and Anthy do find each other again, so that’s something. Depending on what your fandom of Utena is rooted in, your mileage will vary. For me, this was a beautiful, but ever-so-slightly unsatisfying story.

Ratings:

Art – 9 I have repeatedly mentioned that Saitou-sensei’s art is amazing.
Story – 8 One point off for not giving Utena and Anthy the time and page count lavished on the student council
Characters – 8
Yuri – 5
Service – 3 Naked Anthy is still a thing.

Overall – 9

I guess I’ll just have to stick with my own Utena fanfic for now, since Saito-sensei and I don’t share a vision. If it were up to me Kozue and Shiori* would not have been given so much real estate. ^_^

* I don’t dislike Shiori….I just don’t like Juri and Shiori together. Juri deserves someone better.





Happy Go Lucky Days

November 15th, 2020

“My first kiss was with a girl.

Her name was Yuri-chan. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not.”

These are the opening lines of Happy Go Lucky Days, the anime movie based on Shimura Takako’s manga Dounika Naru Hibi (どうにかなる日々). The movie was originally supposed to have had a spring 2020 release, but due to COVID-19 delays, it was pushed back to autumn. The Asian Pop-up Festival streamed it with English subtitles. The opening 8 minutes of the movie are still on Youtube on the Cinema Today channel for you to enjoy.

The story is a loose conglomeration of scenarios that revolve around love and sex and romance. The first scenario follows Ecchan, who dated the above-mentioned girl named Yuri in high school. Years later, she’s attending Yuri’s wedding and finding herself crying in the bathroom, where she encounters Aya, who also has dated Yuri, in college. Motivated by their common ground of annoyance with Yuri, they end up sleeping together, then just being together, in a way that feels comfortable and not forced at all. Yuri’s marriage has done something good for them, at least. ^_^

The second scenario follows Sawa-sensei, a man who feels very closeted to me, as he navigates a confession from a student and need for affection.

The third scenario is my least favorite. Sayoko was thrown out of her house for doing a porn video and is staying with neighbors. Her overtly sexualized behavior and speech fucks around with Shin-chan who is only in 5th grade. He and his best friend and ultimately girlfriend Mika, are made aware of sex because of Sayoko. We watch as they navigate puberty…something I’m not really all that interested in doing.

The team at Pony Canyon for this movie was the same as brought us Asagao to Kase-san, so the animation was very pretty, although the scenery and content was less well-served by the animation. Hotel bathrooms can only be lovingly animated to a very limited extent. ^_^; 

The content is in exactly the space that Takako-sensei really sits most comfortably, as characters become uncomfortably aware of their sexuality (or, in other of her works, gender.) It’s never a wholly pleasant journey, but it’s not unpleasant, either. It always feels a little like she’s trying to figure something out, or standing outside, looking in on people’s inner thoughts, trying to work out something in herself.

In this case, I found myself relieved that the initial scenario was not unpleasantly complicated and we’re left thinking that it could be a happily-at least for a normal course of time- after. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8,8,6
Characters – 8
Queer – 8 in the first vignette, and yes…but, for Sawa-sensei. He’s questioning more than queer. Let’s give him a 5.
Service – Yes. Sex and sex adjacent stuff. I’d give it a 6.

Overall – 8

Happy Go Lucky Days was pretty and the lesbians are okay. ^_^





Yuri is My Job, Volume 6

November 9th, 2020

Depending on who you feel is the actual protagonist of the story – or whomever you are personally rooting for – Yuri is My Job, Volume 6 by Miman can be hard on the heart.

Let us say, for instance, that you feel Hime is the protagonist, as we’ve been following her since the first page of the series. In that case, Volume 6 is largely her struggling trying to not hurt her former best friend again, while also not hurting her newer best friend and preserving the even newer relationship she’s built with that former best friend.

If you’re rooting for Mitsuki, you’re about to watch her spill her heart and soul out in front of Hime without any guarantee of it being recoverable.

If you, like me, actually sympathize most with Sumika and Kanako, you’re going to be watching as things break and you cannot even help to catch the pieces this time.

It seems like something is going to have to give and Hime decides that that thing…is her. Or, is she just running away again? We don’t know yet. (Frankly, we *still* don’t know in the ongoing serialized chapters in Comic Yuri Hime, either. ^_^;)

Despite Miman’s protestations to the opposite in the author’s note, it seems like the story is very much under control. We, the readers can’t yet predict the outcome….but we can conjecture on the possible courses to lead to the outcomes we want, which is a wholly different thing.I know what I want – it isn’t Hime and Mitsuki as a couple. I expect that is what we’ll get, and that’s jut fine. But it’s not that I want.

Miman’s art is stronger than ever before, backgrounds are really being filled out and characters have more definition. So, when we get the next volume, pay close attention to the background people. They are getting people-ier. ^_^

When the Yuri in this volume lands, it lands hard. ^_^

Kodansha is doing  clean job of the reproduction. And we’re getting people to credit now for that work. Translation by Diana Taylor captures the emotion beautifully, Jennifer Skarupa’s lettering helps keep the story moving along. Logo design and cover design by Phil Balsman and My Truong respectively are terrific and editing by Haruko Hashimoto pulls it all together.

 

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Service – 4 Mitsuki’s cleavage is its own character
Yuri – 7

Overall – 8

Yuri is My Job, Volume 6 is a pivotal – and emotional – volume of a a series that is more than the sum of it’s Yuri trope parts.